Professor Dave here, I wanna tell you about Herbert Hoover.
Herbert Hoover was the 31st President of the United States.
As president from 1929 to 1933, his programs were overwhelmed by the Great Depression,
which seemed to get worse every year despite the increasingly large-scale interventions
he made in the economy.
He was defeated in a landslide in 1932 by Democrat Franklin Roosevelt, and he spent
the rest of his days denouncing big government, liberalism, and federal intervention in economic
affairs, as Democrats repeatedly used his Depression record to attack conservatism and
justify more regulation of the economy.
Hoover was a lifelong Quaker, and a successful mining engineer.
In World War I he built an international reputation as a humanitarian by leading relief efforts
in Belgium, as well as Eastern Europe after the war was over.
His reputation as a Progressive businessman fighting for efficiency and elimination of
waste was built when he was the Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge Administrations.
Hoover was given free reign by President Coolidge to deregulate industry, and many of his laissez-faire
economic policies are blamed for causing the Great Depression.
Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no elected-office experience.
His supporters mobilized anti-Catholic sentiment against Democratic opponent, Al Smith, and
Hoover won in a landslide.
But when the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office,
Hoover abandoned his ideological opposition to government intervention and tried to combat
the ensuing Great Depression in the United States with large-scale government public
works projects such as the Hoover Dam.
But the world economy continued to collapse and most of Hoover’s initiatives were ineffective.
He was a firm believer in balanced budgets, as were most Democrats, and was unwilling
to run a budget deficit to fund welfare programs, instead increasing taxes on the wealthy, but
the budget went into deficit anyway.
Hoover did pursue many proactive Federal policies in his attempts to pull the country out of
the Depression, but they never seemed to have any impact.
One of Hoover’s biggest Depression-era miscalculations was his handling of the Bonus Army in 1932.
Thousands of World War I veterans and their families demonstrated and camped out in Washington
DC during June 1932, calling for immediate payment of a bonus that they were told in
1924 that they could receive in 1945.
Although offered money by Congress to return home, some members of the “Bonus Army” remained.
Washington police tried to remove the demonstrators from their camp, but they were outnumbered
and couldn’t succeed.
The police fired shots in a futile attempt to attain order, and two protesters were killed
while many officers were injured.
Hoover sent U.S. Army forces led by General Douglas MacArthur and helped by
Officers Dwight D. Eisenhower and George S. Patton to stop a Bonus Army march.
MacArthur, believing he was fighting a communist revolution, chose to clear out the camp with
military force.
In the confrontation that followed, hundreds of civilians were injured.
Hoover had sent orders that the Army was not to move on the encampment, but MacArthur chose
to ignore the command.
Hoover was furious, but refused to reprimand MacArthur.
The entire incident was another disaster for Hoover.
That led Democratic presidential candidate New York Governor Franklin Roosevelt to declare
of Hoover: “There is nothing inside the man but jelly!”
His economic policies, plus his continued support for the widely unpopular Prohibition
resulted in landslide defeat at the hands of Roosevelt in the 1932 election.
Hoover became a conservative spokesman for opposition to the domestic and foreign policies
of the FDR’s New Deal.
He opposed entry into the Second World War and was given no role to play.
But in 1946, President Harry Truman appointed Hoover to survey war-torn Germany, which produced
a number of reports that changed U.S. occupation policy, and in 1947 he was chosen to head
the Hoover Commission, which was meant to encourage greater efficiency throughout the
federal bureaucracy.
Though he managed somewhat to rehabilitate his legacy, Hoover is still widely regarded
as one of the worst U.S Presidents.